In December 2024, a man was shot dead on a Manhattan sidewalk in the pre-dawn dark. He was a healthcare CEO, killed execution-style outside a hotel where his company was holding its investor conference. Within hours, before the shooter was even identified, something strange bloomed across the internet: not horror, but celebration. Comment sections filled with jokes about claim denials. Strangers raised money for the accused killer’s legal defense. T-shirts appeared. A folk hero had been manufactured in real time, out of raw public fury at an insurance system that denies one in five claims and bankrupts families for the crime of getting sick.
Nobody defending the killing believed murder solves healthcare policy. That was never the point. The point was the release — the collective, cathartic relief of finally having a body to blame for a diffuse, decades-old, bipartisan, structurally embedded catastrophe that no single villain actually created.
This is not a story about one killing. It is a symptom. And the man who diagnosed the disease died in 2015, decades before anyone had heard of algorithmic outrage or claim-denial rates — because he wasn’t studying healthcare. He was studying humanity’s oldest trick for surviving itself.
The Machinery Girard Found Underneath Every Myth
René Girard spent his career reading myths the way a detective reads crime scenes — not for what they celebrated, but for what they were covering up. His discovery was unglamorous and devastating: human desire is not original. We do not want things because they are inherently desirable; we want them because someone else wants them first. He called this mimetic desire — desire that copies, that catches like a contagion from person to person, group to group.
This copying is what makes culture possible. It is also what makes culture
